As Jimmy Butler Sizzles, Bulls Struggle to Play .500 Ball

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Jimmy Butler of the Chicago Bulls, who is averaging 25 points a game after 52- and 42-point outings last week.CreditJonathan Daniel/Getty Images

By Jeff Arnold

Jan. 11, 2017

CHICAGO — As was his normal postgame ritual, Jimmy Butler peered into his tidy locker stall and methodically finished dressing as a half-circle of reporters and television cameras, at least six deep, impatiently pressed up behind him.

Butler, the 6-foot-7 All-Star swingman for the Chicago Bulls, played coy as he attended to every fashionable detail. He inserted a sparkling diamond stud into each earlobe and fastened a pair of gold chains around his neck. After slipping into a jacket, Butler turned and immediately stepped back from the outstretched microphones and digital recorders.

On this night, like others, Butler, a 27-year-old in his sixth N.B.A. season, was the center of attention inside a Bulls locker room that is a little lighter on star power than it used to be.

Derrick Rose, once a hometown hero, was dealt in the off-season to the Knicks, with whom he is now encountering a good deal of adversity. Joakim Noah, a center who played for nearly a decade in Chicago, is also a Knick these days and is not having an easy time of it, either, as he hears criticism that he looks washed up at 31.

And the Bulls said goodbye to Pau Gasol, who went to the San Antonio Spurs in free agency.

In their place, the Bulls signed the 12-time All-Star Dwyane Wade, a Chicago native, to a two-year, $47.5 million deal and added the veteran point guard Rajon Rondo on a two-year, $28 million contract, creating what Rondo, at least, proclaimed to be a new Big Three in Chicago.

Well, not quite. As the 2016-17 campaign approaches the midway point, the Bulls (19-20) are in danger, for now, of missing the playoffs for a second straight season.

Under their second-year coach, Fred Hoiberg, they are much closer to the Knicks (17-22) in the standings than they are to the teams at the top of the Eastern Conference. And when the two clubs meet on Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, it will be a full-scale battle of the barely mediocre. Both teams have plenty of problems, and both teams have players who are making the wrong kind of headlines these days.

On Tuesday, for instance, Rondo played for the first time since Dec. 30, logging 27 minutes in a 101-99 loss to the Wizards in Washington. The enigmatic Rondo, who had been unceremoniously benched by Hoiberg for five games, told reporters that a team official had informed him he had been held out to save “me from myself.”

Rondo was once a star in Boston. But he has had all sorts of problems in his N.B.A. career, and the Bulls suspended him for one game early last month after a reported altercation with an assistant coach.

Wade, at 34, has been rested for the second of back-to-back games, echoing the concern the Knicks now have with the ability of 32-year-old Carmelo Anthony to deal with games on consecutive days.

Butler, in contrast, is a good deal younger and can deal with a heavy workload. Even when he was struck by flu symptoms at the start of the week, he tried to play through them.

Still, in a home game against Oklahoma City on Monday, he went 0 for 6 from the field and scored just 1 point in 29 futile minutes. Not surprisingly, without their star to lean on, the Bulls were blown out.

The disappointing game for Butler — who also sat out Tuesday against the Wizards and will apparently not play against the Knicks, either — came after a standout week in which he averaged 38 points, 9.3 rebounds and 6.3 assists in leading the Bulls to consecutive wins over Charlotte, Cleveland and Toronto.

Butler scored 52 points in the game against the Hornets and finished the week with a 42-point performance against the Raptors.

All of this came against the distraction of Bleacher Report’s suggestion that the Bulls could be shopping Butler, who avoided the off-season housecleaning.

“My job’s not to worry about what the media is writing, what’s going on in the outside world,” said Butler, who is averaging a career-best 25 points and 6.7 rebounds per game this season. “My job is to come in here and work and try to help this team win games.

“I tell everybody — just like they tell me — we’re all we got in here. Good, bad, indifferent. We can always lean on each other. With all of the hippity-hoopla that’s going around, you just keep being you and keep working.”

Wade, who spent 13 seasons with Miami, winning three championships, has quickly become a Butler fan.

“He’s just not at home kicking his feet up because he had a 52-point game or a 40-point game,” said Wade, who, like Butler, played his college ball at Marquette. “He’s still working. The guy wants to be great.”

But whether Butler will receive the support he needs to get the Bulls to the playoffs remains a question mark. Wade is the team’s next-best offensive threat, but his numbers, not surprisingly, are slipping. He is averaging 30.4 minutes per game — a career low, if not a bad figure — and 18.7 points, his lowest mark since he was a rookie in 2003-4.

By contrast, Butler is hearing “M.V.P.” chants from crowds at United Center — pretty good for someone who was the 30th pick in the 2011 draft. But Butler has been around long enough to know that such acclaim tends to ring hollow unless the Bulls have some success, too.

At the moment, it is not clear that they will. They are, in many ways, like the Knicks — not terrible but not particularly good.

In one key way, though, they are different: They have a star in his prime. As soon as he feels better, that is.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: In Chicago, a Struggling Cast Surrounds a Rising Star. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe